Dagger Key and Other Stories

Her shift in mood had the same abruptness as Grace’s withdrawals, the same switched-off quality, and he wondered if this was a condition of the place or if the people who gravitated here were all prone to similar behavior.

“I don’t know if I can help,” he said. “But I need to find this woman before…”

“Yeah, I know. Grace. The love of your life or some shit. Gotta find her.” She walked off several paces. “Keep going through the doors. You’ll hook up eventually.”

“You want to come with me?” he asked. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but if you want to come…”

He eased up behind her, trying to see her face. She was weeping and appeared no longer to recognize that he was there.

Shellane abandoned the stairs, passing through a number of rooms in rapid succession. One contained several items of furniture, notably a dusty standing mirror in which he glimpsed a haggard, rumpled version of himself, and in three of them he found a single person, two women and a man. They treated him much as had the black-haired woman. They did not recognize immediately that he was alive and, once they did, they answered a few questions, asked for his help, then lost interest. Based on their reactions and what they told him, he constructed a hypothesis.

Religious perspectives on the afterlife were, of course, inaccurate; but it might be that none of them were completely inaccurate. Perhaps the afterlife consisted of many planes, and these planes—or rather a misapprehension of their nature—had given rise to the various religions. Might it not be possible, then, that one such plane had been appropriated by a sub-order of creatures whose power was slight, and who were capable of capturing a certain type of enfeebled soul? Perhaps they were themselves enfeebled—creatures perceived as terrifying by the earthbound, but to those who were familiar with them, those whose fear was colored with contempt, they were jerks, creeps, geeks. The uglies. Metaphysical lowlifes. It seemed a ludicrous proposition until he compared it to the ludicrous propositions of the major religions. The salient difference between those propositions and his own was that his was based to a degree on personal observation.

Beside each door were small patches of ridges in the wood similar to that he had found beside the second door he’d tried. He pushed at them in sequence, two at a time, all to no avail. But then he gave the knob of one door a quarter turn, not sufficient to disengage the lock, and the seams beside the door pulsed as if some charge or fluid were passing through them. He was elated to find that some orderly process was involved. There must be a sequence—many sequences—of constrictions that affected the doors, causing them to take you to different quarters of the house. Either he was not strong enough to manipulate the ridges or else there was some other factor involved that he did not understand.

The last door he tried delivered him into a tunnel with walls of black boards…though at first glance they had the irregular, roughened look of wood in a natural state, making it appear that he was walking along inside a huge hollow limb. Like the fist that protruded from the exterior of the house, the boards here were warped into shapes that simulated nature. Thin gaps between them glowed whitely, effecting a dim lighting. The other parts of the house he had investigated—despite the people he’d encountered—had seemed sterile. Lifeless. But here he caught a vibe of animal presence, and as he proceeded along the tunnel he smelled a fecal odor and observed signs of rough occupancy. Gashes and indentations in the wood; boards that had been pried loose. Evidences, he thought, of rage or frustration or some allied emotion. Or perhaps of a vandal’s idiot frenzy. The tunnel wound downward at a steep angle for approximately forty feet, then straightened and narrowed to the point that he could touch both walls at once; after a stretch of about sixty feet it widened by half and, as he rounded a bend, he spotted Grace standing a few yards ahead, her back pressed against the wall. When he called out, she turned her head and stared at him with an aggrieved expression. Drawing near, he saw that she was imprisoned by bands of black wood that encircled her waist and neck, leaving her arms free.

“Roy!” She strained toward him, then slumped in her restraints. “Get away from here.”

Shellane tugged at the bands. There was no visible lock, no catch. They looked to have grown around her.

“They’ll be back soon.” Grace tried to push him away. “You have to go!”

He studied the wall beside her.

“They’ll kill you,” Grace said.

“Be quiet,” he told her. “I’m working.”

“If they see you, they’ll know. I won’t be able to come to you anymore. Please!”

Next to one end of the band encircling her waist was a single raised seam, barely an inch long. Close by it, a board had been worked loose, leaving a half-inch aperture aglow with white radiance.